The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week reported 3 million U.S. deaths for 2024 in the preliminary death counts that go with its weekly influenza tracking updates.
The total is 0.9% lower than the comparable CDC total for 2023 but 8.2% higher than the comparable total for 2019.
Similarly, the preliminary CDC count for the fourth quarter of 2024 is 740,222.
The fourth-quarter death count is 3.2% lower than the comparable fourth-quarter total for 2023 but 9.7% higher than the comparable total for 2019.
The total includes deaths from all causes, including COVID-19, long COVID, the impact of COVID on the U.S. health care system, influenza, opioid abuse, and, possibly, the side effects of efforts to prevent and treat COVID.
The increase could also reflect changes in recordkeeping and an increase in the number of U.S. residents who are now ages 75 and older.
What it means: Life insurers have emphasized that they have taken the possibility of COVID continuing to push up U.S. mortality in their own math, but advisors may need to continue to help clients plan for the possibility that their life expectancy might be more difficult to predict than it was before the COVID pandemic surfaced, in early 2020.
One possibility is that weaker people with life insurance and annuities died earlier in the pandemic and that the survivors of the early pandemic years will live longer than advisors might have originally estimated, because the COVID survivors are especially strong, healthy people. If that's the case, clients could face a greater risk of outliving their retirement savings as well as a greater risk of premature death.
Corroboration: Life settlement firms have suggested that mortality appears to have returned to normal for their insureds, but DaVita, a kidney dialysis firm, has reported that higher-than-expected mortality has hurt its patient volume this year.
The Atlanta headquarters of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Credit: Katherine Welles/Shutterstock
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